The following was borrowed from
Anna's blog because I found it very interesting.
In 2003,
The Big Read (a BBC programme) compiled a list of Britain’s 100 favorite books. The program reckoned that the average adult has read only 6 of the books on this list.
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.(Having seen the movie does not count, of course!)
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
4
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell ( read it midway as a child and got bored)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Elliot (Marian Evans)
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh ( reading it now...stopped at first chapter..)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Marquèz
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Marte
l52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth ( Am looking for this book)
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love in The Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Marquèz
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett74 Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Colour Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87
Charlotte’s Web – EB White88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90
The Magic Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
:(
My count...a mere 14
